Some previous experience of folk dancing is desirable
and anyone doing
this project will need to attend some dances during the project period to
get practical experience of the topic to be simulated. Because of the short
time period allowed for M.Sc projects, it would be unwise to choose this
topic if you have no experience of either English Folk Dancing, Scottish
Dancing or American Square Dancing.

An important component of English Folk-dancing is the
patterns produced by the inter-related movements of the members of the set.
This is best seen when standing on a balcony and looking down on the dance
hall. The project would study methods of displaying such patterns.

The easiest view would be a plan view (from vertically
above the set) and again using colour to indicate the different couples,
with the option of "inky feet" leaving a trail to indicate the path traversed
by each individual. This would not need to generate images of the dancers,
but could use symbols (possibly a red circle for the first man and a red
square for the first woman, with other colours for the other couples). The
symbols would need to be moved to indicate the path travelled by each dancer.
Since English, Scottish and American dances all have their own distinctive
styles and figures, there is scope for several projects without moving to the
rarer examples such as Morris or sword dancing.

The dances are made up of figures, such as "right and
left hand star", "ladies chain","circle left and right" and so on. For a
general system, you would need to write software to simulate each figure and
then use a database of dances to display each of the dances. About six or
seven of the most common figures would be sufficient to include and display
a large number of dances. Such a system would be necessary for the basic
project and would qualify for a pass mark or better depending on how well
it was implemented. To have a chance of a first class mark would require
additional facilities.

The most obvious extension would be to add the music and
get the speed of movement of the symbols to fit the music. This will probably
require adjusting the number of iterations to generate the path in order to
take the required time and will be a mixture of calculation and experiment.

A more demanding project would take the view looking down
on the set from an angle of 45o (isometric projective view) and
showing the movement through the figures with each couple, still identified
by a distinctive colour, but represented by actual animated figures. This
would still require images of the dancers to move along the correct
paths, but involve animation of the figures as well as their movement along
the correct paths.